Powerpoint presentation at ASSA meetings, January 2019.

DETAILS:

1.  Students present data in class

• Second day of class, assign each student (or team) a variable (list of macro variables released monthly)
• Assignment 1: find release dates online
• They do two-minute presentation in class after variable is released; must include one or two plots in Excel
  • Presentation 1: basics of variable and simple plot
  • Presentation 2: more sophisticated plot
  • Presentation 3: multi-variable plot
• Example

2. Professor shows data in class (especially if class is large)

• Present recent data
• Especially if data illustrate theoretical concept covered in course
• Examples

3. Student teams organized by sector

• Assign each team a sector
  • Household (consumption, housing, confidence)
  • Business (industrial production, corp. profits, durables)
  • Government (spending, deficit, taxes, debt)
  • International (exchange rates, current account)
  • Labor Markets (employment, wages)
  • Inflation (consumer prices, expectations)
  • Financial sector (stock prices, interest rates)
• Produce newsletter three times during semester
  • Useful for student-managed investment fund
  • Competition for best graph (Daily Shot)
  • Example

4. Students work with data during class

• Students bring laptops and work on data project in class (20 minutes, one session each week)
• Monitor and note that results will be on exams
• First session: introduction to FRED and how to do simple things
•   Topics can be tailored to your class
  • Nominal versus real variables (Example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=mtKc) [List of NIPA variables]
  • Noise versus signal (Example)
  • Understanding data revisions (List of variables for looking at data revisions)
  • Seasonal adjustment (List of variables for looking at seasonal variation) (Example)
  • Cross-country comparisons
  • Gains from looking at disaggregated data (Example)
  • Current state of economy
  • Engaging in monetary policy in practice

5. Students work with data outside of class

• Working with Macroeconomic Data section in textbook
• Many ideas to illustrate theory and relate it to data

  • Calculate real interest rates and show how they have changed over time
  • Calculate the openness index as the sum of imports as a share of GDP and exports as a share of GDP
  • Test the rationality of forecasts of interest rates or inflation rates by creating a scatter plot of forecasts versus actuals
  • Plot the US capital-labor ratio, output-labor ratio, and consumption-labor ratio and see if there is evidence of a steady state (Example)
  • Plot the monetary base as a share of GDP and the level of federal government debt as a share of GDP to see if there is evidence of monetization of debt (Example)
  • Plot TFP growth over the business cycle to examine patterns (Example)